Tuesday 15 October 2013

The week ahead - more focus on training plan

Now that I have an 'A' race in my diary for next year it is amazing how your mind immediately starts to focus on the task ahead, even though in my case the event is over 10 months away.

Most training programs, either developed by a professional coach on a bespoke basis or something out of a book are around 20-30 weeks so I have a bit of time to research.

I was pleased to see that the Challenge series offer training plans to all athletes that enter one of their events, which I understand is distributed via a regular newsletter. My initial thought is to take information from a couple of great books I have read on the subject (Joe Friel - The Triathlete's Training Bible and Don Fink - Be Iron Fit) and amalgamate with the plan provided to me in 2012 by Coach Tickner (when I entered IM Austria) and finally cross-check with any useful recommendations from Challenge.

I will aim to increase the hours per week steadily for a three-week cycle and then take one week slightly easier. Most weeks I expect to take one rest day. The plan will be to include a greater amount of strength work, to help with injury prevention, and more brick sessions for specificity benefits.

The main benefits of being in control of my plan is that it can be totally flexible. The clear disadvantages are my lack of experience, compared to a professional Coach, and simply not pushing myself hard enough or the opposite and worry about overtraining.

Over the coming weeks I will allocate more time and further blog space to covering this important planning stage. I also hope to get together with a couple of my fellow Club members who are competing in the same race to get their views.

Meanwhile, the plan for the week is as follows:

Mon - rest day (following long 25km trail run)
Tue - 2:00 bike commute (Hill work / easy return)
Wed - 1:00 tempo run + 1:30 Club swim
Thu - 2:00 bike commute (Interval set / easy return)
Fri - 0:45 strength / strides run set
Sat - 4:00 Club ride (Isle of Wight tour - to be confirmed) - probably easy pace
Sun - 1:00 easy run or brick session (rollers / run) - subject to Sat training

I will aim for 10 hours, which is a realistic goal, but a decent step up from the average 8 hours that I have been logging since the end of August.

Let's see how it goes!

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